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Tuesday, February 18th, 2025
| Time | Event |
| 6:05a | When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981)
Though he never said so directly, we might expect that Situationist Guy Debord would have included Saturday Night Live in what he called the “Spectacle”—the mass media presentation of a totalizing reality, “the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise.” The slickness of TV, even live comedy TV, masks carefully orchestrated maneuvers on the part of its creators and advertisers. In Debord’s analysis, nothing is exempted from the spectacle’s consolidation of power; it co-opts everything for its purposes. Even seeming contradictions within the spectacle—the skewering of political figures, for example, to their seeming displeasure—serve the purposes of power: The spectacle, wrote Debord, “is the opposite of dialogue.” So I wonder, what he might have made of the appearance of cult writer and Beat pioneer William S. Burroughs on the comedy show in 1981? Was Burroughs—a mastermind of the counterculture—co-opted by the powers that be? The author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night also appeared in a Nike ad and several films and music videos, becoming a “presence in American pop culture,” writes R.U. Sirius in Everybody Must Get Stoned. David Seed notes that Burroughs “is remembered by many members of the intelligentsia and glitterati as dinner partner for the likes of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger,” though he had “been a model for the political and social left.” Had he been neutered by the 80s, his outrageously anarchist sentiments turned to radical kitsch? Or maybe Burroughs disrupted the spectacle, his droning, monotonous delivery giving viewers of SNL exactly the opposite of what they were trained to expect. The appearance was his widest exposure to date (immediately afterward, he moved from New York to Lawrence, Kansas). One of the show’s writers convinced producer Dick Ebersol to put Burroughs on. In rehearsal, writes Burroughs’ biographer Ted Morgan, Ebersol “found Burroughs ‘boring and dreadful,’ and ordered that his time slot be cut from six to three and a half minutes. The writers, however, conspired to let his performance stand as it was, and on November 7, he kicked off the show sitting behind a desk, the lighting giving his face a sepulchral gauntness.” In the grainy video above, Burroughs reads from Naked Lunch and cut-up novel Nova Express, bringing the sadistic Dr. Benway into America’s living rooms, as the audience laughs nervously. Sound effects of bombs and strains of the national anthem play behind him as he reads. It stands as perhaps one of the strangest moments in live television. “Burroughs had positioned himself as the Great Outsider,” writes Morgan, “but on the night of November 7 he had reached the position where the actress Lauren Hutton could introduce him to an audience of 100 million viewers as America’s greatest living writer.” I’m sure Burroughs got a kick out of the description. In any case, the clip shows us a SNL of bygone days that occasionally disrupted the usual state of programming, as when it had punk band Fear on the show. Perhaps Burroughs’ commercial appearances also show us how the counterculture gets co-opted and repackaged for middle-class tastes. Then again, one of the great ironies of Burroughs’ life is that he both began and ended it as “a true member of the midwestern tax-paying middle class.” The following year in Lawrence, Kansas, he “caught up on his correspondence.” One student in Montreal wrote, imagining him in “a male whorehouse in Tangier.” Burroughs replied, “No… I live in a small house on a tree-lined street in Lawrence, Kansas, with my beloved cat Ruski. My hobbies are hunting, fishing, and pistol practice.” Did Burroughs, who spent his life destroying mass culture with cut-ups and curses, sell out—as he once accused Truman Capote of doing—by becoming a celebrity? Perhaps we should let him answer the charge. In answer to a fan from England who called him “God,” Burroughs wrote, “You got me wrong, Raymond, I am but a humble practitioner of the scrivener’s trade. God? Not me. I don’t have the qualifications. Old Sarge told me years ago: ‘Don’t be a volunteer, kid.’ God is always trying to foist his lousy job not someone else. You gotta be crazy to take it. Just a Tech Sergeant in the Shakespeare Squadron.” Burroughs may have used his celebrity status to his literary advantage, and used it to pay the bills and work with artists he admired and vice-versa, but he never saw himself as more than a writer (and perhaps lay magician), and he abjured the hero worship that made him a cult figure. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016. Related Content Beat Writer William S. Burroughs Spreads Counterculture Cool on Nike Sneakers, 1994 How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972) The “Priest” They Called Him: A Dark Collaboration Between Kurt Cobain & William S. Burroughs |
| 10:00a | Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer
When they make their first transoceanic voyage, more than a few Americans choose to go to England, on the assumption that, whatever culture shock they might experience, at least none of the difficulties will be linguistic. Only when it’s too late do they discover the true meaning of the old line about being separated by a common language. Take place names, not just in England but even more so across the whole of Great Britain. How would you pronounce, for instance, Beaulieu, Rampisham, Mousehole, Towcester, Gotham, Quernmore, Alnwick, or Frome? There’s a good chance that you got most of those wrong, even if you’re not American. But as explained in the Map Men video above, bona fide Brits also have trouble with some of them: a few years ago, the deceptively straightforward-looking Frome came out on top of a domestic survey of the most mispronounced names. If you’re keen on making your experience in Great Britain somewhat less embarrassing, whatever your nationality, the Map Men have put together a humorous guide to the rules of “proper” place-name pronunciation — such as they exist — as well as an explanation of the historical factors that originally made it so counterintuitive. The evolution of the English language itself has something to do with it, involving as it does “a base of Germanic Anglo-Saxon,” a “healthy dash of Old Norse,” a “huge dollop of Norman French,” and “just a fairly detectable hint of Celtic.” British place names reflect its history of settlement and invasion, the oldest of them being Celtic in origin (the dreaded Frome, for example), followed by Latin, then Germanic Anglo-Saxon (resulting in cities with names like Norwich, whose silent W I never seem to pronounce silently enough to satisfy an Englishman), then Norse. After centuries and centuries of subsequent shifts in pronunciation without corresponding changes in spelling, you arrive in a country “littered with phonetic booby traps.” It could all seem like a reflection of the characteristic British anti-logic diagnosed, not without a note of pride, by George Orwell. But traveling Americans gassed up on their perceptions of their own relative practicality should take a long, hard look at a map of the United States some time. Having grown up in Washington State, I ask this: who among you dares to pronounce the names of towns like Marysville, Puyallup, Yakima, or Sequim? Related content: The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map How Londinium Became London, Lutetia Became Paris, and Other Roman Cities Got Their Modern Names Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006 The Entire History of the British Isles Animated: 42,000 BCE to Today The Atlas of True Names Restores Modern Cities to Their Middle Earth-ish Roots Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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